The Seneca Indian Nation has turned to one of the country’s pre-eminent scholars in Native American law to take up its fight against the state of New York over hundreds of millions of dollars in disputed payments from the tribe’s three casinos.
Kevin Washburn, a professor of law at the University of New Mexico who served as an assistant secretary for Indian Affairs in the Obama administration, will represent the tribe on a three-member arbitration panel tasked with trying to resolve the dispute.
The state will choose its own arbitrator, and the two will select a mutually agreeable third arbitrator to act as a neutral party.
Washburn, said Seneca President Todd Gates, “brings a deep understanding of the federal framework that governs all Native gaming compacts, compact obligations, and how state governments should interact with Native nations.”
He was dean of UNM prior to joining the Interior Department in October 2012. He held the assistant secretary’s post in the Bureau of Indian Affairs for three years. He also has served as an assistant U.S. attorney and general counsel to the National Indian Gaming Commission.
“We are taking the next step,” Gates said. “I hope that the state will work to keep the arbitration process moving so that the facts and foundation of the compact can be presented.”
“The Seneca Nation,” he added, “is ready.”
The Senecas and the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo fell out with each other back in March, when the tribe declared an end to 14 years of payments to the state derived from the revenue generated by thousands of slot machines the tribe operates in casinos in Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Salamanca. Through the end of 2016, when the Senecas claim the revenue-sharing obligation expired, the tribe sent to Albany some $1.4 billion in all.
New York reads the compact differently, claiming the Senecas are required to continue the payments under the terms of provisions in the agreement that were renegotiated in the midst of a similar dispute with the tribe that lasted several years before it was resolved in 2013.
The last eight months have seen the dispute erupt into war of words between the tribe and the Cuomo administration, with the Senecas claiming the governor has rebuffed their offers to negotiate?despite the fact that the three casino host cities and dozens of surrounding communities stand to lose millions of dollars representing their cut of the revenue-share with the state?and the administration accusing the tribe of violating the compact and threatening to license a competing commercial casino in Niagara Falls, the tribe’s most lucrative market.
The commercial casino issue is an especially sore one for the Senecas in New York’s increasingly crowded gambling market. The tribe halted revenue-sharing once before, in 2009, over the state’s decision to allow machine gaming at racetracks, which the tribe saw as violating its compacted monopoly over casino-style gaming across a broad swath of western New York.
The latest dispute stems at least in part from New York’s decision four years ago to license up to seven full-scale commercial casinos, three of which have opened over the last year, and one of them, del Lago Resort & Casino in the Finger Lakes, straddling the boundary of the Senecas’ exclusivity zone.
